This is pretty awesome!
Personally I felt a bit distracted somehow, and kept looking at the street by the boys feet instead of the faces and streetlamp - which feel like they should be the focalpoints.
In edit tried to:
- decrease brightness and detail in places other that above focal points (mainly street, hair and some rimlights)
- increased shadow depth on her left arm and below boys cheek.

I can imagine that you feel that way but I dislike the idea of lowering the saturation of the highlight

However thanks for your feedback and impression! The way a viewer feels when looking at this piece is of course very important for the final version, though this is not final.
I like the idea, I might have guessed zombie the demoniacally possessed though; are ghosts not usually a bit more incorporeal? You see through ‘em a bit, not really affected by scene lighting etc. Probably there’s many and varied kinds of ghosts but I had a go at the translucent effect using the fog idea you had which I rather liked; it might be easier to sell with more/more colourful background stuff though.
I changed the angle of the lamp to a bit more straight on 'cos it was a bit hard to place in space; seemed like it might have been over the brow of a hill and so not have been casting so much light into the foreground, probably should have raised it up a bit too I guess.
I also second the love for those gnarly 1-bit bushes you had going before, anyhow stick at it!


The term 'ghost' was not specially aiming to describe logic but simply appearance of a mysterious figure (two in this piece).
Translucent might be used on the fog while not on the figures. I am afraid making both translucent would cause tons of readability problems.
Finally those are not just some ghosts as I said before. Probably at bad idea to pick up this term, my bad

However thank you a lot for the idea on the lantern and the visual example. It helped me to realize the fog/mist idea more visually.
Oh! You reminded me of how much I liked the concept of the bushes! I sadly wont be able to use the first version you liked so much due the huge amount of unmanageable dirty pixels.
Although I will give the bushes a new attempt in general.
I have a question. These shadows are correct?

Bonus question: how do i calculate these shadows?

Those are probably not right. I moved the light source around quite often.
If you want to actually calculate shadows roughly: Trigonometry; do some research about this.
However I think this is a rather ugly (but precise) way to 'calculate' shadows properly.
When it comes down to bodies (e.g. anatomy) you can always make use of your own body/real life.
On this piece it could be done like this: Place two blocks on a surface. One taller for the woman and a smaller one for the girl.
Try to reduce/turn off all light sources in the room. Now take a lamp or something rather close to the shape of the light source of the lantern.
The rest should be self explanatory! Play around with distances, positions and angles. Now you know how the shadow will fall, how stretched it is and so on.
As I said in the reply to the post of Facet, I worked on the bushes again.
I really want to finish the piece before I add animated features (like the fog).
Another idea which came up in my mind had in the last days was to add a border to the left (a tree).

On the one hand the tree is just sketched but on the other I tried to add some texture to it.
The lines on it (the brightest colour) should be more curved maybe due the tree being roundish
Nonetheless the tree is targeted to be not that fancy to reduce attraction. That is why I do not want to use highlights on it.
The bushes are a dirty pixel fest, haha. Some of you might remember them, they lurk around on some older pages

However I really want to tackle them again!
This is my first rough attempt to bring some real volume into these bushes:

This was another attempt make more out of the texture while respecting the volume idea:

I really want to go for those bushes. If somebody could give me some help and share his or her mind about those posted images that would be great!
If there would be someone who could do an edit onto certain area of the bushes to show me how to clean them that would be even greater

Overall I am thankful for every idea and help concerning this piece!
